Great powers often decline through self-inflicted blows. By starting a trade war he was unable to follow through on, Donald Trump may have just dealt a severe one to the United States.
Rich and Successful Enough to Be Moral
Rutger Bregman’s book Moral Ambition calls for successful people to use their talents to “make a difference.” But he’s suspicious of systemic change, making his call for personal morality into a shallow exercise in self-help.
How China Is Reacting to Donald Trump’s Trade War
Amid all the confusing signals, China is clearly the prime target for Trump’s trade agenda. China’s best response to tariffs would be to rely more on domestic consumption than exports, but executing that turn presents a huge challenge for its leaders.
Bet on Worker-to-Worker Organizing
There are no guarantees that any approaches, new or old, to reversing the labor movement’s decline will succeed. But Eric Blanc makes a case for why we should wager on worker-to-worker unionism.
Can Canada’s Left Survive Trump’s Second Term?
The NDP helped build Canada’s welfare state. Now, under pressure from Donald Trump’s tariffs and a shifting political terrain, the party risks electoral annihilation as voters split between technocratic centrism and right-wing populism.
Born in the seventeenth century, our faith in progress is now at death’s door. Sociologist Göran Therborn traces the idea’s history — and argues that it must be revived.
An Italian Communist in the Ethiopian Resistance
On April 25, Italians celebrate liberation from Fascism. One leading partisan was Ilio Barontini, a Communist who helped lead Ethiopia’s resistance against Benito Mussolini’s colonial occupation.
Turning Retirement Against Workers
You’ve been saving for retirement. But Wall Street has been using your savings to erode union strength, inflate asset prices, and consolidate its control over the economy.
Ha-Joon Chang: There Should Be No Return to Free Trade
Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the global trade regime are chaotic and uncoordinated. As economist Ha-Joon Chang tells Jacobin, Trump has failed to see that the cause of the US’s relative decline is its own domestic capitalist class.
When US Labor Helped Free Jailed Salvadoran Trade Unionists
As American unions denounce Donald Trump’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego García to El Salvador, it’s worth recalling when US labor used its collective power to resist repression in that country in the 1980s.
Indonesia’s Communists Helped Forge Its National Identity
After the bloody repression of the Indonesian left in the 1960s, Suharto’s regime wrote it out of the history books. Indonesian communists played a crucial role in developing national consciousness among workers and peasants against Dutch colonial rule.
Sinners Is the Non-IP Hit Hollywood Needed
Ryan Coogler’s vampires ’n’ blues thriller Sinners is everything Hollywood tells us the masses don’t want: Set a hundred years in the past, it’s not a sequel, reboot, or adaptation of anything. And yet it’s a smash hit with moviegoers.
The GOP’s Tax Revolt May Be Unraveling
Tax cuts for the rich have been the glue holding the American right together for decades. But as Republican voters’ skepticism of this strategy grows, some GOP lawmakers are considering the unthinkable: proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy.
Trump’s Tariffs and Capital’s Constraints
When Donald Trump was forced to pause most of his tariffs, the country got a basic lesson in Marxist state theory: when states push policies that threaten profits, they trigger mechanisms that discipline them back into line with capitalist interests.
